Haje’s Brain

I lived in London for about 18 months, during the bulk of which I was with Be Internet. You may have heard of them, they offer internet connectivity which is, quite frankly, ludicrously fast. I never quite managed to measure how fast, but it was upwards of 20 mbps download and probably around 2mbps upload. In fact, I frequently had significantly faster internet at home than at work.

Be was fantastic, in that they Just Worked: Blisteringly fast, 100% uptime, and – the one time I had to contact them about something (I needed the IP addresses to their DNS servers) – quick and highly skilled customer service who answered the question you asked, rather than waffling randomly for no reason (yes, BT Internet customer service, I’m looking at you).

Somehow, I had failed to register that Be has a 1 year minimum contract – which I was first billed for 03/02/2008, or pretty exactly 10.5 months ago. I also reluctantly paid a £24 connection fee (What? tie me in for a year and charge me £24 for the privilege? Daft…)

When I was in Liverpool and in Bristol, I was a customer of Zen internet, and had nothing but brilliant things to say about them – fantastic customer service, great reliability, fabulous internet connection speed, etc. Zen also have a great policy: No minimum contract time, and no cancellation hassle. They reckon that if they do their job right, you’ll want to stay with them, and you’d have no reason to leave them… A policy I greatly appreciated, adn which I had somehow assumed that Be also had.

Turns out that’s not the case. Be internet has a 1 year minimum contract and a 3-month cancellation policy, the latter of which I was unable to make use of, because 3 months before I had to move house, I had no idea that I was moving house. In fact, up until a few days ahead of handing in my notice to my landlord, I hadn’t the foggiest idea I was going to move to a different city – but that’s a different story.

It turns out that Be either want a 3-month policy (Why? Be, you have a phenomenal service, once you’ve convinced someone to join you, nobody in their right mind would leave again! You’re just expensive enough to keep the BT and Tiscali numpties away, and offer the fastest internet available in London…), or they charge you £40 for their quick termination policy (Despite that their website reads £30 express cancellation fee). In addition, they want their modem and various filters etc back (using Freepost, which is fair enough, I guess), or they’ll charge you £100.

I don’t want to sound bitter or anything, but up until this moment, I was evangelising Be to everyone who’d listen to me. I’ve gotten at least 5 friends to swap their accounts over to Be, and I’ve been speaking warmly about their service level to anyone who’d listen to me.

It’s really weird to me – why would Be do its best to scorn its ex-customers? Seriously, Be, I don’t mind paying for the rest of the month, and I’ll even ship back the WiFi base station / switch / modem to you with a smile on my face… But charging me £40 for the privilege of leaving is just incomprehensible – especially considering that I would have signed up with Be again in a heartbeat if they’d only have their services available in Reading.

So yes – if anyone from Be ends up reading this – please consider changing your policy, guys… Hell hath no fury like a previously happy customer scorned.